Importing characters and animations doesn't work like it used to

Unfortunately recent version of the engine broke down our character / animation pipeline. We have been successfully using the same workflow for 2.5 years now for our big indie title “Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm” until the recent engine version update.

We have a single work file for all of the game’s humanoid animations. So far we have little less than 200 animations that has been imported into the game from the same FBX file. I am constantly making new animations as well as tweaking a lot of the old ones, so many times I have updates for tens of animations as well as completely new animations that I want to import into the game.

My old workflow for this was to “Import” the FBX file into the Characters folder. This would add the new animations as well as replace the old ones, so I was able to get both updates and new animations with a single import. Also, if there was a need to tweak the import settings, I was able to do it.

At the moment, this does not work anymore. I don’t get import dialogue and simply importing the file again into the Characters folder does not update the animations nor add the new ones to our project.

My new method (which I hope I don’t need to use for long), includes manually reimporting the animations that I have updates for. Selecting these animations from the crowd of almost 200 animations is not optimal experience and many times if I have more than 10 updated animations, I will just select all of the character animations and select “reimport”. Reimporting the animations this way happens automatically, but takes a long time, so at this point I will just go and get a coffee.

After the reimport, I need to get the new animations into the project. So what I will do is import the FBX file to another folder (usually Content root) and after the import is complete, I will handpick the new animations within the 200 animations and move them to Characters folder and delete the rest of the files.

I used to avoid all of this with a single import, save all and submit.

Any info on this? Here is the same issue: